Wednesday, December 21

how WE did applesauce

Pretty aren't they? I know its not much, but in the past when we've been the grateful recipients of fresh home-grown apples from martin's grandparents lovely orchard, we've mostly turned them into dried apple 'chips' (after we'd eaten our fill, stored some in the fridge to last longer, and made as many pies are crisps as we could manage).

This year though, after we'd dried as many as we wanted and made as many treats as we could eat, we still had a medium box left!! seeing as we all love applesauce, it just seemed natural that that is what we would use the last of the apples for.

So here is how we made our 12 quarts and 12 pints of sauce:

We started by using my mothers apple peeler-corer-thingy to remove the majority of the peel (but not all of it), the core and seeds, and to slice them up all in a few little twists! twas very fast, and they look lovely do they not?

Than we added all the sliced apples to a boiling pot with about a quart of water.

Once the apples were cooked enough to turn into a nice lumpy mush we put them in the blender and reduced the 'mush' to a lovely batch of sauce! so sweet and smooth. mmm!

We than added the steamy sauce to our jars! just enough for a batch, and when the steam was high enough we started the timer. 15 min's for pints and 20 for quarts. As we kept on blending we put the sauce in a heated pot to keep it nice and hot for the next few batches.

Remember those lovely skins that we peeled from the apples?

Oh i hope you didn't throw them away! because they are nearly as good as the sauce itself! and I'm not just talking about the freshly peeled strings...

I'm talking about throwing them on some sheets in your dehydrator (assuming you own one, although your oven might work just as nicely) and turning them into delicious crisp apple strings! maybe not the most appealing of names, but what would you call them?:) at any rate, it was the Mr's idea and they are indeed a tasty treat.

Here is a glimpse of about 1/16 of the sliced apples that we dried this year. The quantity is owing to the fact that every last slice we dried last year got eaten up in about the first two weeks. these guys are in high demand! haha

So there you have it folks! see, told you it was easy as...sauce:) and all four of us in this house will be enjoying these bottles for at least a month or so I'm sure... if they last that long that is.haha

Give it a try next fall! you'll be glad you did.

xo, Emmy

P.S. if you're wondering about spices and or sweeteners, i know i myself love a bit of cinnamon, but with little babies in the house we decided to can it all pure and strait-up, and plan on just adding a pinch of cinnamon sugar to our own bowls as we wish.